Thursday, October 25, 2007

New IT operational process automation tool

Systems and security management vendor NetIQ has announced the launch of Aegis, a new control and automation platform for IT processes.

NetIQ said it has developed the patent-pending technology used in Aegis in response to a proliferation of service desk automation and service oriented management tools developed by vendors, such as HP's Open View platform and BMC's Remedy or EMC's Smarts.

Chris Pick, NetIQ vice president of products and marketing told IT PRO that users of these tools originally invested in them during the 1990s to improve IT service delivery according to best practice frameworks. But, he said, they are now faced with a proliferation of these tools, meaning they are often under-utilised.

"Aegis acts as an enterprise service bus, to provide event automation and bi-direction integration to other toolsets," he said. "Many users have asked why they should buy the service desk vendor's management control tool, for example."

Aegis delivers run book automation (RBA) designed to automate, measure and create improvised ITIL-based processes that define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows, which support system and network operational processes.

Internally developed with a process-centric perspective, Pick said that with Aegis, intelligent automation can reduce the time spent by IT operations' staff on manual repetitive tasks. And its broad-scope IT automation platform can enable an incremental adoption path for IT information library (ITIL) framework-based best practices.

The Aegis enterprise service bus (ESB) allows for vendor-agnostic integration of existing enterprise, security and application management tools, while its process automation engine and visualisation capabilities allows IT operational managers to execute pre-defined workflows in response to process triggers to command existing permissioned tools to take action.

It also features process improvement reporting capabilities and workflow modelling to calculate process efficiency and demonstrate improvement and make use of pre-built templates. A correlation engine gathers events and data from multiple tool sources and correlates them to produce more intelligent process triggers.

Pick said Aegis would be a key product for both NetIQ's security and systems management products, with its support for common standards, including those that govern web services and security protocols.

"This is the last bastion of control and cost," he said. "By providing more intelligent automation and a platform to maximise under-utilised management tools, Aegis helps organisations better control the cost of IT operations."

Aegis will be generally available from late next month with pricing based on managed object, management server and connectors to third party products.